Today is the culmination of a long couple months of planning and preparation to ship my black lab, General, from Ohio to Germany. He has been staying with my Mother-in-law, Angie, while Jason and I first moved overseas and while we got settled in, found a house, and just figured out what's what.

The process of shipping a pet internationally, especially a large one that can't fit underneath the seat in front of you, is very tedious. It involves many visits to the vet, paperwork, flight reservations, more money than I care to mention, all sorts of regulations - from import, to export, to airline, to veterinary, a visit to the USDA, and some very OCD preparations of a kennel.

This morning Angie, and I woke up before 5am and started our 2+ hour trip from Columbus to Cleveland in order to get General to the airport 3 hours prior to his 11am flight (as required by the airline). He had to fly out of Cleveland vs. Columbus because the size of the planes that leave Columbus. Larger jets, that can therefore accommodate larger cargo leave from Cleveland.

After all the effort listed above and countless checking and double checking that everything was correct and accounted for, we arrive to United Cargo on time and are greeted by nothing but issues. As the cargo men loaded General and his kennel onto the scale, they cracked the kennel and proceeded to tell me that it was like that when I arrived. The crack, although it didn't affect the structural integrity or the security of the kennel, was too severe for them to allow us through.

It constantly amazes me how quick people are to tell you no or to greet you with issues vs. cooperation. Angie said it best this morning when she said "Its frustrating to me that they are treating this like you woke up this morning with this crazy idea to ship your dog to Germany!".

We then went through a litany of issues: First they had us try a kennel they had on hand that was one size bigger. We spent 30 minutes transferring all the stickers, markings, paperwork, etc. onto this new kennel - only to be told that the plane we booked can't accommodate that size kennel after all. Then we were told we had to go find a pet store and buy a new kennel and that he'd have to fly out on a later flight. Next they started to question whether or not I had the right paperwork with me (I about lost my cool at this point because I KNEW that I did). Then it changed to Oh... Opps.. we actually have the exact same kennel that you brought in available here for you to buy after all - sorry we just wasted 2.5 hours of your time and now have 30 minutes to rush and get him ready for the flight...

In the end it was an overall stressful experience that I don't wish on anyone. I pulled out all the stops too, like a good military wife should. I took off my coat to show my pregnant belly, I teared up, and started playing the military dependent card.

I'm happy to say that General has landed in Newark and is hopefully being well taken care of by their on-site vet before his flight to Frankfurt this evening. My level of anxiety is slowly returning to normal. Poor baby (real baby, not dog baby), I worry about the affect of stress on the pregnancy!

I know I kind of mentioned this in my last post too, but as we drove back to Columbus, I was reflecting on this experience, and just thinking about life as a military spouse. There are such highs and lows that are so hard to put into words! Days like today I find myself thinking "Normal people don't have to deal with this kind of crap!", but then there are such highs as well, such as all the opportunities the military has opened up for us - from Jason going to grad school, the many benefits of having Tricare, the sights and places we've been able to see, etc. Its a very unique path that we're on.

Fingers crossed General's flight plans continue to go well, there are no issues when Jason receives him in Frankfurt, and that the poor guy's mental state stays as happy-go-lucky as he usually is.

A friend of mine shared this article with me this week, and I thought it was worth passing on. Its hard to convey a sense of this odd life we live as expats to those whom have never lived it. I have had similar moments as the author describes, since beginning to travel with Jason. Moments where something happens to make you think - Where exactly am I and how did I get here!? or She looks normal, how can I reasonably stalk her and ask her to be my friend? Those, among countless other situations, are sometimes beyond description to friends and family back home, which can leave you feeling very lonely.

Thriving in this unique situation, I believe, very much depends on how successful you are at meeting friends and creating a support system - often with people you may have never been friends with if the situation was different. Every move is a challenge, because you essentially have to start over. Its a unique path to walk, but I'm thankful for all that it has taught me.

I've been in Germany for 2 months as of this week. It has gone by fast, but honestly it seems like its been more than 2 months. We're continuing to get settled into our house - something that I had hoped would be done by now, but now I'm just hoping it'll be done before winter - and get more comfortable in our surroundings.

Jason has dove into work and is still figuring out his role and future, so we're "adjusting" all around :)

We spent the past 5 days in Oxford with our good friends that we met while stationed in Kuwait, and had such a great relaxing trip. Oxford and the surrounding areas are as cute and quaint as you'd imagine and spending time in an English-speaking country was such a nice break. More importantly, we haven't been able to spend that much time with our friends since we moved from Kuwait. Hanging out with them helped give me a little taste of home and helped abate some of my homesickness.

I'll post more photos from our trip soon. My laptop is still out of commission from the tea-spilling-incident. We ordered a new keyboard, which we received today. Hopefully I can convince Jason to install it tonight. I'm anxious to get my computer back. I feel a little lost without it!

After living in Kuwait, I approached our move to Germany like it was going to be a piece of cake. In almost all ways, its a thousand times better than Kuwait, don't get me wrong. However, as we left Kuwait and the experience got further and further away the rough patches of time there faded in my memory and only the good memories stood out. Rough experiences, including the roller coaster of adjustment that comes along with moving abroad - that I conveniently down played in my mind as I mentally prepared for this move.

While making the Kuwait adjustment, I remember being happy one day, completely occupied the next, depressed the next, and then excited the following. It was a constant up and down and honestly I think it lasted almost the whole time we were there, but the roughest patch was obviously before we made friends.

I found an article yesterday talking about these ups and downs and describes them as the Four Stages of Culture Shock. I thought it was interesting and sort of gives a glimpse into the experience.

I'll adjust and hopefully make friends soon, but the initial transition is hard - no matter what country you're in I think because its not home. I'm over the honeymoon phase of just arriving and now feel a little lost. I don't have a routine, a social group, we live far from town which feels a bit isolating, and our house is still a work in progress - so even that doesn't feel like "home" yet.

We have a trip to Oxford coming up in two weeks that I'm super excited for though. Also, I hope to explore some the next couple of weekends and potentially make some more progress on the house. Baby steps...

As I was looking for pictures to accompany this post, I went back to my old posts from when we had just arrived in Kuwait and thought I'd share:

I remember exactly how the hotel smelled when we first arrived. I remember being trapped in the tiny hotel room while Jason had to work because I felt awkward going into the lobby because everyone started at me (I later got over this). But I also remember how awesome the cappuccinos and the sushi in the hotel was :)

Grocery shopping is always a culture shock. In some ways shopping in Kuwait was easier because the stores were bigger and everything was translated in English. Its not the case here, especially in my little town where no one speaks English. This post was before I found what would actually be my favorite grocery store - Lulu's!

My first major dust storm experience - I don't miss these!!

Ok, ok - nothing here is as bad as this, haha. But the bathrooms are weird and sometimes you have to pay :)

Its been an uneventful week and weekend. After a busy day of movers, I've spent most of my time since just unpacking and getting things situated. I'm in a little bit of a rut though, most things that can be unpacked/setup have been and the rest is waiting until we buy wardrobes, the movers come back to pick up the boxes, we figure out how to hang things in concrete, and our transformers get here.

Its always a little unsettling to be in a new city without friends or an agenda. There's a lull while you figure out what you're going to do with yourself and before (hopefully) you make friends.

Sometimes too, when you're not sure where to go, exploring can be a bit challenging and walking around by yourself is only so much fun.

This is what moving day looks like. Our stuff was shipped in the crates you see on the truck. We had 6 crates total of stuff. You can see the path that they had to create over the dirt - this will eventually be our patio and backyard but its obviously not finished yet. See what I meant by tiny? It's better than nothing though.

One side of our bedroom in progress. This will be the wall that the Ikea wardrobes that we still need to buy, will go on.

The guest bedroom so far

Things are coming together slowly. I've hit a little bit of a lull with unpacking (i.e. I don't want to do it anymore), so I'm procrastinating on the computer.

I've been hibernating lately, doing stuff around here and manning the house while movers come and go. Today is the first day that no one is coming and I'm really excited about it.

The house definitely is starting to feel like ours a bit. The cleaning is still constant, but without workers/movers coming in and out its much more manageable thank goodness. I think we're going to have to adopt the practice of always removing our shoes before coming in. With all dark hard-surface floors, you can see any spec of dirt and feel it under your bare feet.

Other quirks that I'm still getting used to include:

The washer/dryer - the washer is tiny, takes forever, and isn't the best in my opinion. I've found detergent spots on the clothes whenever I do a full load. One load set on "Coloureds" takes 2 hours. Then the dryer is more of a water remover, with a tank that fills with water from the clothes. You must empty this tank every couple loads, which means marching it upstairs and dumping it in the sink. It too takes at least 2 hours to dry anything. I think laundry is going to be a constant and ongoing thing, just to keep up.

The sink is still super tiny and annoying, but we bought a new goose neck faucet with a sprayer from Ikea that I hope Jason will install this weekend. That should make things a little more manageable.

Tiny sink without the new faucet

Oh my goodness the trash - we don't have trash bins yet, so I have bags of trash sitting outside my back door because I don't know what else to do with it. When we do get trash bins, we'll get 4 and I'm still trying to decipher what goes in each. I tried setting my bags out with our neighbors bins on the day that I thought was regular trash. The next morning I came out to see only our sad bags of trash left sitting there :(

The trash schedule...

Our box spring wouldn't fit up the stairs when the movers brought it, so now its sitting in our entryway and we've been sleeping without it. Jason wants to try it again himself, and I agree that it looks like it could possibly fit if you tried the right angle, but we may have to remove a stair step or two in order to angle it correctly or purchase a new one that bends or something. I keep thinking of Ross in the episode of Friends when they try to move his new couch up the stairs.

We are still waiting for a new super-transformer the Keurig requires to arrive from Amazon, so I am still without my morning coffee. I've been walking down the street to a bakery every morning and ordering "eine Kaffee, bitte". I'm really ready to brew my own coffee though!

The saddest thing I've been coping with is that I spilled tea on my brand new laptop last week and the keyboard isn't working now. I've got to figure out how to get it fixed soon :( I'm using Jason's laptop in the meantime.

This weekend is a 4 day weekend, but we haven't planned anything because we've been so wrapped up in the move. We're thinking about taking a train ride somewhere because we haven't taken a train since we've been in country. At a minimum, we'll head up to Frankfurt, but I'm going to try to brainstorm somewhere a little more exciting - we'll see.

They're still scary stairs, but SO much better than the scrap wood we had before. I'm looking forward to cleaning for real and not having to wear shoes every time I want to use the stairs! (p.s. - there's still paper on them in this picture just to protect the wood while the workers are here)

See? So much better. No more gaping holes between the stairs and the wall.

Yesterday we picked up our car that we shipped overseas. It was my first day of driving in Germany and everything went well. Not driving for a couple weeks and having to study & take a test to get a license has made me a little nervous about driving here. I keep having to remind myself that I drove in Kuwait without incident, so this should be a piece of cake! Its so nice to have our car back! It'll take some getting used to looking at the kph vs. mph though.

We have workers in the house all day today installing our REAL stairs (YAY!), tiling our basement, and turning on the internet. Also, the rest of our stuff has arrived in country and Jason is working with the movers to get a delivery setup for as soon as possible (Monday would be beautiful, so fingers crossed!). Things are coming together, slowly but surely.

Also I found these chips at our grocery this week. I resisted buying them at first because they were a little pricey, but got them last night. They're very ham-ey :)

I have been mostly without internet for a week now (ah!). We have data on our phone, which is enough to text message over WhatsApp, check the weather, google translate, and somewhat peruse facebook - but open up a website? Forget it.

We have signed up for internet at our house, but have to wait for something to arrive in the mail before it can be switched on (what year is it again!?). My super techy husband, however, has figured out a way for me to temporarily connect to the internet on my laptop - using the wireless on his cell phone. Its really nice having a nerd in the house!

So to catch up from the last week....

Our kitchen & all our stuff right after it arrived

We moved into our house and we got our first shipment of stuff from the States. Our stairs are still in the death-trap-form as the picture below shows. I've been cleaning and cleaning, trying to control the dust that is constantly tracked in either from our staircase or the construction site that surrounds our house, but its fruitless.

Our first shipment of stuff was our kitchen, towels/linens, and clothes. Since we have no furniture or storage, most of this stuff is just in piles. I have the kitchen all setup and have cooked a couple times already. Its amazing how just having your kitchen stuff back makes it feel much more like home.

The kitchen has some serious quirks though that are going to take some getting used to. First of all, our counters are wood veneer of some sort. I'm super afraid to let water sit on it for any amount of time, so I'm constantly wiping them down. Our kitchen sink is SUPER tiny and the faucet is stupid. It gets in the way of washing dishes - so I then get water everywhere - compounding the above issue. We're considering replacing it with a sprayer faucet, but would need to order it from the States because the ones we've seen here (Ikea included) are like $300+! Our refrigerator is tiny, which actually hasn't bothered me so far and we have a backup refrigerator in the basement, so I think that's a problem I can deal with. Also, we only have big drawers, no cabinets. So that's a little different. I think I have it figured out for now though, and we'll be purchasing a kitchen island and some shelf storage soon - which will help tremendously. One day I hope to have a kitchen with enough storage that getting things in and out isn't so puzzle-like!

As for the rest of the house, it is BARE. I've had to turn a guest room into a giant closet since we don't have closets or dressers to store our clothes in at the moment. The room is filled with piles of clothes, organized by type. We need to go buy wardrobes from Ikea, but the boxes wont fit in our tiny car and we haven't figured out how to either get them home an alternate way or what all it entails to have Ikea deliver them.

All the floors in the house are dark tile or dark wood laminate, so any amount of dust shows. We had all tile in Kuwait too, but we also had a maid to clean once a week and carpets provided by Jason's work all over the place. I think Ikea is going to make a killing off of us this year! I so wish we could have a maid here too!

Hopefully the rest of our stuff will be here in the next couple of weeks (they said at the latest by Sept. 9th). Our stairs are supposed to be finished on Friday. Hopefully we'll have internet sometime next week. The tile is being laid in our basement this week.